Historical Accuracy
by Luc Court
Summary: Threechapter fic, POV Itachi, spoilers up to ch 213. What really guides a path from beginning to end can be lost in history later. Finished.
1. Setting

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Historical Accuracy

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Three-chapter fic, POV Itachi, spoilers. Written during the release of Naruto ch. 213. Further chapters of Naruto may prove this fic worthless.

* * *

They say that victors are the writers of history. 

But in reality, it is built only by the survivors.

* * *

How did it begin?

__

With my brother.

Sasuke stole a number of my kunai once. I didn't notice until I had to reach for them during a mission, used up all of my leg stash and was fumbling for my hip pocket. Sloppy of me. I normally check my equipment beforehand, but those were my spares and I hadn't expected to have to resort to such measures.

The target died anyway. It just took longer.

I came back looking for the weapons in my room and found him waiting there, trying to learn what looked like a juggling act with the blades. The scrape of the door being pulled back startled him; my brother jerked in surprise and sliced his own finger. Three of the kunai slapped to the ground. One stuck in the floor, point-down.

"Too bad," I informed him, politely. "Those are the poisoned ones. You've got five minutes left before your heart stops."

Sasuke's eyes went wide as circles before he jammed his finger in his mouth, trying to suck at the wound until his cheeks bowed inwards from effort.

I didn't bother to close the door, just walked in and dropped my scrolls on the bed along with the Anbu mask.

"Foolish little brother."

My kid sibling was never very good at surviving.

He just didn't have the reason to. No one was telling him yet that he should be more like me instead of like himself, become someone already graduated from school and well into service for the Anbu before puberty had a chance to kick in fully. Sasuke looked up to me. Given time, he might have been resentful of the difference between us, but he was still young enough to have only admiration. Not hate.

And Sasuke didn't expect me to lie. Not until he realized--ten minutes later, no sense of time on his part, very ineffective--that I was calmly unbuckling the equipment pouches from my legs and arms, sliding off the flak jacket and frowning at a strange stain near the collar. He was alive. I wasn't screaming for a doctor. Mother was calling up the stairs for us to come down to dinner.

Sasuke slid the finger out of his mouth, the pad wrinkled from spit, and eyed me with confusion.

Not good at surviving at all, my brother.

I'd forgotten to recoat those kunai after cleaning them two days ago, anyway.

* * *

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With the field medic.

The Yakushi family was the best. They were Konoha's pride. Trainers of Anbu for dissection lessons, corpse-hunters who'd have to perform on the field with limited time and limited resources to dispose rogue ninja. Everyone knew the Yakushis. Who could forget them after the anatomy lessons, the pleasant-faced Yakushi matron taking away the girls to one room after asking someone to bring her a cucumber?

They dressed like no one with an ounce of self-respect should. The full-body work suits might have been designed to keep blood and other toxins away from their own flesh, but the bright fabric was so puffy and clumped that they resembled overweight ducklings.

I felt bad for anyone who had to wear those things, especially when the weather was hot.

Air conditioning had been piped into the clinics anyway, so I'm sure they didn't care. Even the waiting rooms were chilly. Fans spun overhead, circulating the smell of chemicals into the summer-humidity seeping in from outside, snow in the winter. I'd had more time than I wanted becoming familiar with the mix. 

The first time I was exposed to prolonged hours in the clinic was a summer day, hot and wretched with its own moisture. An Anbu had been discovered from my own team, dead; he'd had few external wounds to match the way his body had bloated dark purple, so the verdict had been poison. As patrol leader, it was up to me to answer questions.

My morning had been wasted watching the Yakushis and their assistants bustle in and out of the autopsy chamber, yellow fabric flashing in various states of disarray while the medics hurried to pull on their bulky uniforms over more normal clothes. 

I looked around for magazines to read. 

All the good ones must have been stolen.

The Yakushi's boy exited the dissections room at a quarter past noon, shedding creaks of his heavy apron while he bore an instrument tray in his hands. He fumbled when he set the towel-draped burden down on the nearest table. The instruments protested their poor handling by mob-clattering, rattling defense of their own rights in sanitized metal tongues. 

He ignored them. Pawed his facemask down. 

The nametag on his apron said Kabuto.

"Uchiha?" Having my nod, the teenager continued. "Where did you find him again?"

"Field past Mitashi River," I intoned. "Six-fifteen in the evening. Yesterday. Position prone, rigor mortis already lost."

Since he wasn't one of the actual medics working on the corpse, Kabuto hadn't been required to wear the full duck-suit. Instead he'd been dressed in a thick rubber apron that had smears of dark color across the front; I wasn't sure if those were antibacterial washes, or liquids from some other part of the Anbu fatality.

Kabuto pulled off his mask with a snap of elastic and sent it flying across the room like a rubber band. It impacted the wall with an imperceptible thump, fell to the ground. 

"No other tracking signs around him?"

"Just a few footprints. Deliberately concealed, two travelers."

"And the rest of the Anbu think it's the Mist refugees you've been hunting earlier?"

"Yes."

Kabuto set down his fingertip on the tray and slid it to the side, skewing the instruments as he did. They collected like driftweed in the corner. "My father says it looks like ingestion, judging from the internal damage to the stomach lining. Strange thing is, we can't figure out what he might have eaten without suspecting anything was wrong."

I watched Kabuto's lack of reaction, utter relaxation under the topic of foul play. 

"Your father's really good at this."

"Ah."

The medic's boy stood there in silence for a while, looking as if he was hypnotized by the play of sun on the wall. It rippled through the blinds of the waiting room. Slatted forms of light, external intrusion to this world of air conditioning.

In the room behind us, I heard the clatter of gurneys shifted. The corpse was probably being further negotiated. If the dissection was taking this long, they must be stripping the flesh as carefully as possible to search for further evidence of treachery. 

Just like a fillet. Fishbones.

I tried not to think about it.

"Hey, Uchiha?"  
  
"Mm?"

"Want to get lunch?"

Kabuto's takeout consisted of a container of cold noodles. The upraised happy face on the top proclaimed a standardized _Thank You Very Much._

I chose yakisoba.

"My treat," Kabuto proclaimed at the ramen bar while we were standing, peering at the menu. "I've got enough in allowance."

The cook poured our orders straight from the pans into the trays. I could feel the heat of mine even through my gloves when I accepted the box. "Your parents must like you," I replied, neutral, already starting to walk away and look for a place to sit.

"I was real lucky." Kabuto popped the styrofoam lid to doublecheck the pepper content, and grimaced at the chirp of the foam latch. "Not everyone gets picked up by such good people."

The hill by Ichiraku Ramen gave visitors a scenic overlook of several meadows in exchange for a hefty climb up the incline. Travel effort didn't matter to me and Kabuto gave no comment, so we both slogged up the slope. The top was covered with small flowers; whites and yellows, petals undisturbed by the winds. 

The range was private enough, and that was the important thing. I didn't need extra guests.

Lunch happened.

Kabuto made a face at the noodles hanging from his chopsticks during some of that time. I suppose they reminded him of intestines. He offered them to me with a flick of his diningware; I declined, chewing methodically on my own meal and thinking about what stage of progress the medical examiners must have reached by now.

Afterwards, the lids of his lunchbox closed, Kabuto worried his thumbnail across the styrofoam. The grooves left behind were in long arcing loops, like the path of a snaketail in the sand. Eventually they dead-ended in the face stamped in the center, coming against the raised barrier of the outer circle with a mouse-squeak thump.

This didn't deter him. Kabuto's hand made the slightest jump over the facial wall and proceeded to dig tiny x-marks over the divot-eyes of the face. Once he'd creased deep trenches into the optics, he resorted to methodical cross-hatchings to cover the rest of the oval surfaces. 

It was a destruction performed with the same exacting attention to detail as a doctor might an autopsy. Rightful for the Yakushi eldest. Kabuto stood to inherit the business once he got old enough, even if he didn't display outright talent to his family.

"Do you think there'll be trouble?" The boy's voice was absent-minded while he worked.

"No. Maybe," I corrected myself, hypnotized by Kabuto's patient obliteration of the happy face on his lunchbox. "I don't think anyone will notice us."

Kabuto glanced up from his lunchbox-corpse then, settling his grey eyes on me with a cool humor. "I meant, with the Anbu poison."

The wind picked up. It threw dandelion fluff between us both with the same irreverence of a child scattering toys. Pollen confused the air. I smelled lunch and metal-oil and formaldehyde, all mixed in with flowers. 

Kabuto saw my nostrils flare as I tried to track the scents. I think he smiled.

Then the breeze shifted. The medical boy made a face when a large clump of dandelion-dust stuck itself between the lens of his glasses and his cheek. He reached up with his hand to flick it away. I took advantage of the moment to look down.

The face on the styrofoam had been completely flattened by Kabuto's fingernail, smeared down to an indistinguishable mess. You would have needed a skilled imagination to guess there had been features there at all.

When I reached out and touched the gloss-crushed surface, the plastic foam was perfectly smooth.

"I'll take care of the trash for you here. Think you can go first, Uchiha?"

"Ah."


	2. Narrative

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Author's Note: I'd like to thank Akira Yaida for catching my brief Kisame slip. It sounds so much like Kisama (and acts like one), I just mentally swap the two.

* * *

How did it continue?

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With my family.

How can a single person kill an entire clan in a night? The idea is ridiculous when put into words. Any skeptic automatically begins to tally up the exertion factor, traveling distances, noise and insulation factors. Weapons required. Defensive attributes, locational regions. Doubters will change the number. They will lessen my clan to reduce my achievement, minimize my work into a total well within the boundaries of human.

But it happens. With a surprising regularity among the Countries, no less. S-class criminals slaughtering half their village in a few hours armed only by a toothpick, children able to kill because they'd learned a kitchen knife before the concept of _malice_, or _predetermination_.

No, I can't say I had them in mind to idolize. I never poured over the illegals list like Sasuke's fresh-faced enthusiasm with my weapons, obsessed over their acts with an emulation approaching my brother's love of me. By this token, whichever one of us was normal--he not graduated from school by his age of eight and I already with one eye out for assassination missions--isn't up to me to judge.

So many deaths. For such a thing to occur, historians might say, a fluke must have skewed the odds. Food poisoning. Illness, perhaps. Either that, or the murder spree never happened at all, and I was a myth created to scare children late at night, just like half a dozen Bingo Book accounts united only by their mass depravities.

Even I found it hard to believe when I was standing over the bodies of the last, and then touched a toe to my mother's body to make certain she was real.

I still can't believe it now. 

My father had activated the Sharingan when he sensed the danger. He could smell the gore on me and guessed the actual source; my mother had noticed, but thought I was coming back from a mission gone wrong, that I was the one wounded and bleeding. She was in the middle of getting bandages when my father tried to disarm me.

It was better to see my father's irises stained red. Firewall pinwheels. My mother had started to, brown eyes fading into ruby as she saw the kunai come up, but she hadn't made it all the way into full bloom before I brought the blade around. 

Then there was red, too much of it, but it was all spouting out from her body.

I can't look at Sharingan eyes without thinking about how inhuman they are. Like someone possessed by hell. Hateful. Murderous. 

Unreal.

Like the bodies of my family at my feet, getting prodded by a foot to doublecheck that I wasn't really dreaming.

I have been able to learn how to use these eyes of mine to create nightmares for others. Hypnosis, that's the Sharingan art when applied to others. I think it's the same on ourselves who wield the eye. You tell yourself that you can perform another's jutsu and it happens. Like magic. 

You fool yourself into believing that you can see the life-chakra of others. Right on schedule, this becomes true. Then you order yourself to see past illusions and that barrier falls as well.

Finally, you reach the conclusion that the life itself is as transparent as genjutsu, and human beings become as unimportant as the wind or a tongue of fire. As fingers obliterating a plastic face, while their owner gives no sign of awareness that he is doing such a thing at all.

Hypnosis. You can believe anything and it becomes real. That's the power of the Sharingan eye, staring back at me from my mirror in the inn rooms late at night, the glass cracked and running a line straight across my features. 

I could use my abilities on myself, but I'm already in a nightmare.

Maybe they'll write this all down as the Sharingan's fault in the end. What melodrama. Strip out my willingness to choose this path and blame another source, excuse my lack of conscience by assuming it never played a part at all. A love of power on my part led me to fall prey to another's control, or an insanity brought on by genius blossoming too young. Or simply a natural conclusion, an evolution of a hypothesis bred in my family until it manifested full in me.

Like children, learning to kill. What did it matter if we performed our skills upon our families or on the names listed on contract assignments? I don't know why villages even try to act surprised anymore when they find bodies scattered on the roads in the morning. What else did they really think would happen by raising us for such tasks? 

Creative arts and crafts?

* * * 

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With Orochimaru.

I didn't like him.

Kisame didn't either, which showed the Mist outcast had good taste in one thing. When Kisame had a distaste of a person, he shifted his weight side to side while talking about them, gripped the hilt of his sword tighter. He ground the points of his teeth harder. Bit his own lip, worried it like a scrap of meat until blood began to flush and then seep out the oblong punctures. 

I knew this behavior stemmed from Kisame fantasizing about murder. 

In Orochimaru's case, I couldn't blame him.

Not really.

* * * 

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With Kisame. 

Kisame never understood why I liked to watch the clouds roll by. I suppose he didn't have much need for weather-watching in the Mist, in the land of water itself.

"Do you think it'll rain today?" 

I asked this, back on the ground and one leg propped up on the other knee. Hands crossed and underneath my head. Sun strong on my face. The grass smelled fresh and clean, and the unaccountable craving for noodles crawled up to my mouth from my stomach.

The Mist-nin gave one arbitrary glance up at the sky. "Doesn't look like snow," he grunted. "I don't care."

Sentimentalism was a thing alien to Kisame, or at least when it came to my tastes. What mattered was that he left me alone until I got up and dusted stray shreds of green off my pants. For all his lack of interest in subtlety, Kisame sensed right off that rushing me wasn't a wise thing to do. 

I respected that, so I also respected the few times he did remind me to move along. Such observation of personal quirks managed to keep the both of us obedient to working as a team. 

Sentimentalism. I guess I'm prone to it. It's not a secret either, so I shouldn't have been surprised to be partnered with a ninja whose greatest daydream involved beating everyone in the Akatsuki at shogi and then forcing them to buy him drinks.

Kisame smelled like fish all the time. I told him it was because he ate too much soba.

"Don't be so stupid," he growled back to me, huffing the weight of his sword on his shoulder as he always did whenever someone struck a nerve. I kept waiting for the stick of his hilt to snap right off, the blade to go plummeting to the ground and maybe impale someone else's foot.

Compensation was fine. To a point. A sword that was heavier than two small children stuck together was overdoing it. I told him that, too, but he didn't seem to appreciate it.

"You've been looking at the sky too long, Itachi."

Maybe that was true. When I closed my eyes, the afterburns of the sun were blazoned into my lids, fat spots of grease floating in the red water of my flesh.

"Itachi, are you even listening to me?" Grass crunched underneath Kisame's weight. I heard him walking over, mentally reminding myself to be careful sweeping our tracks away later. Reason again why that man's sword was extreme, for all that he swung it around as if the metal was nothing greater than tin. 

Darkness blotted out the theater play of pain. Closing your eyes at high noon doesn't protect you entirely from getting burned, not if your face is directly pointed at the sun, and my lids were beginning to wince tighter shut in an attempt to protect themselves. By the sheer width of the shadow's coolness, I guessed that Kisame was standing over me. Nice of him to do so.

Then I got a boot shoving into my ribs. "Hey. Sleepyass."

I ignored him.

Again, the prod. "Itachi, you bum."

After waiting to see if Kisame's irritation would get any worse, I eventually cracked open an eye, and promptly had to squint against the brilliance surrounding the man's silhouette. "Yes?" 

"Get up before I carry you like the sad sack of onions that you are."

The sun made me sleepy as a cat. I yawned, languid, taking my own time in blinking myself back to full alertness. Kisame gave me a hand up, and then promptly pretended that he hadn't, turning his hip in a swagger. "What were you thinking about, dozing off like that?"

"Arts and crafts."

"What?" One beady eye narrowed at me, incredulous at what he thought he'd just heard. 

I found myself wondering if sharks could make the same befuddled expression. Pearl divers should beware. Then I only shook my head, lifting fingers and finding another piece of grass stuck in my hair when I raked my fingers through it. "Only thinking about the job."

Reminder of our task brought Kisame's attention full-ahead, turning the man towards the direction of Konoha's skyline in the distance. The buildings didn't look any different from here, knitted amidst the trees like a particularly strange piece of ribbon in someone's embroidery. "We've got some time to do our search," he commented. "And lunchtime's going to be over at this rate. I hope there're still good places to eat, unless that attack destroyed them all…" And here he stopped, giving me a look back over the edge of his shoulder as if equally hungry for a reaction on my part as he was to see a lack of one.

I gave him the latter. "I don't think it matters." Afternoon warmth had squirmed inside my mouth like a disease, forcing me to yawn again, long. "This is the Leaf. Even when their members are killed, nothing really changes."

"No?"

"No," I repeated back, finishing with one final stretch, "and none of it makes a difference in the end. Not at all."


	3. Conclusion

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How will it end?

With the people who survive. Naturally.

Not with yakisoba at half-past-noon, or meadowgrass tales. Nor with my brother's finger in his mouth, lips quirked quizzical while I plucked my kunai off the floor. Not even with my knock on the innroom door while the Nine-tails boy squinted up to me in all his blonde confusion.

By the time the victors will be crowing over my corpse, a new beginning will have already occurred. The old one will be lost. Forgotten. A mass fabrication will replace the numerous threads that led me to this course, rope-thick rationale serving as an easy explanation for everything I have ever done.

And these summer-moment strands, gone forever.

Certain events never happen at all, when a story is written. They slip through the cracks of the tale. Unimportant, or considered detrimental to a smooth flow of events. Point A links up neatly with point B, then to point C, all targets on a map that historians can stretch out and track with nodding heads. 

Ledgers never make note of the number of days it took to cross from Mizumashi to Takuyan Bridge. They just want to make sure you got there.

Or didn't, sometimes.

History is a box unfolded. The walls form a path when laid flat, but you are not allowed to stray. Instead you trace your proscribed route. This is how events started. This is why they occurred. That which does not fit in is a fluke. 

Eventually, the jarring details are forgotten.

If they were not dominant enough to survive past historical selection, they will never have existed at all.

Motivations aren't ever written down the right way. Even if you leave a detailed memoir stating precisely why you took a step forward, a step back, readers will like to create their own rationales to puppet you. You went back because of pity. You killed your family out of hate. You didn't care and were a monster; you had a heart as compassionate as a childbirth-god and acted out of mercy.

Any truth you'd have will die with you. History in all its lies will be declared by the ones still standing, whether they'd been fighting in the war or not. Whether they even understood. Or not.

The Hidden Villages will say anything about me later. It's unavoidable. A person can't hope to act in this world and not be made maladjusted by the victors.

Not that such things bother me anymore. 

They shouldn't.

This existence is transcendental. Walking over the boards of a bridge is an exercise in detachment. The wood isn't really there; the hollow thunks of my boots on the planks is just noise, the death of my parents just so much organic meat. Kisame isn't muttering in monotone to make up for the silence that I bring. The hour is never afternoon, and I'm not listening to teenagers whose eyes go red when the sun catches the angle just right.

Red. Not quite like the Sharingan, those demon's pits of pinwheels. Sometimes at night I wake up trying to remember what color my eyes really are, because incredibly enough I have forgotten during the course of my dreams. When I fumble for the light and then a mirror, I always catch myself before I lift the glass to check. It's too late at this point in the tale to search for what I used to be. 

I wonder how long I can keep telling myself these things. 

As long as it takes, I suppose. No more. No less.

"Your face isn't looking so good, Itachi."

I am continuing to walk.

"Hold up. We can stop here."

Kisame's hand thrusts itself in front of me and I find myself stepping into it, his fingers pressed against my stomach. I am surprised to discover him there. Maybe he is right--I _am_ tired. 

Blame the Leaf for that. The ruse with Jiraya should have worked for longer. There shouldn't have been so many instructors catching us on the bridge.

There shouldn't have been my brother in the hall.

When the Mist outcast is vexed about something he cannot kill, he takes it out on inanimate objects. I hear him grumble while he tramps through the underbrush with those heavy boots of his, looking for a suitable place to rest. He kicks a fallen branch out of the way with the same scorn he would use on a body. 

It is important for us not to leave tracks but Kisame has never been particularly subtle.

I will clean up after we are ready to leave.

We find a spot several minutes from the main path and I sit, leaning against a tree and feeling the nubs of bark through my clothes. The afternoon sun through the forest is a patchwork nightmare for the paranoid. Leaves rustle. Any whisper of branches could be sign of Anbu hard on our trail.

I am not afraid of being attacked out here. Kisame could kill any who would try to assault us, and I don't care even if assassins do show up to fight.

And Konoha won't send any. The attack by Orochimaru has left them cautious. Self-preservation is straining the Leaf thin. If the Akatsuki wished, we could pick off their numbers at our leisure, forcing the Leaf to narrow their territories down like a rat backed into an alley corner. The other countries would move in. Konoha would collapse inwards, and any recovery of its power could take decades. 

  
They are still sensitive from the fox. Determined. But weakened nonetheless.

Konoha is not that important. I have said as much. We do not need to break their backs anew just to see if the third time would be the charm.

I have said this many times. 

Kisame listens to me when I do, which is another reason I am not so displeased that he was assigned as my partner. Overcompensation and all. 

He is a strange creature to watch sitting. Action suits him better, even the bristling stride he uses when he is resentful, or the crass proddings of his chopsticks to his ramen bowl as if he hopes it will bleed if he shoves hard enough. Kisame is a shark at heart. Always moving, keeping water running over his gills so that he can breathe.

When Kisame plays shogi, he does so with one finger in the air, knuckle waving to the beat of his thoughts. It is possible to tell when he's found a strategy by how that hand speeds up. If you trace which piece Kisame regards at a time, combine it with the intensity of his motions, you can read his pattern of attack as clearly as if you used the Sharingan.

No one's told him that, of course. We like winning too much.

"Have you got your strength back yet, Itachi?"

Kisame is very tough. I wonder how long he will survive.

"I never know what you're thinking, with that expression of yours."

When I still refuse to speak, Kisame snorts through his nose and turns his face away. Now his foot is moving. Just the toes, painted shards of the nails stirring as the Mist-nin suppresses the urge to tap his heel, impatient. 

If this afternoon does not exist, then it will not disturb me when it is forgotten.

My eyes hurt. The sun strikes pangs into my face, plunging hot needles into my skull. I knuckle my temples in an attempt to arbitrate the pains. Sleep would be a welcome option now, but we are too close to Konoha for a prolonged nap. Even so, I know that Kisame would watch over me well enough that I could wake surrounded by corpses, and he grinning, pointing out that not even a drop of their blood had fallen upon my cloak.

I drowse.

In time I wake and realize that the sun has passed faster than I thought. By the angle, we are risking evening. Kisame hears my stir and looks over to me, sword on his knees like a table and sandal-laces in his lap. When I stare groggily at what he is doing with a shoe in his hands, uncomprehending, he offers the sandal back to me.

"Yours."

So it is. I hadn't realized one of my laces was about to break.

All the same, I glance up to him with a brow I hope is arched.

"Feeling any better?" Upon my nod, Kisame's face splits into a sharp smile. "Good. I'd hate to see you get wasted on _these_ pieces of trash."

"I won't die yet." Rising to my feet reminds me of the process of muscles uncoiling, bones organized to their task. Such are the mechanics of living. Most of the time, they involve willpower and little more. Other times, they require resources. I am hungry. My foot is cold. The basics.

I do not ask Kisame just how he removed my sandal while I was asleep, wordlessly slipping it back on and testing the tauntness of the new cord with a flex of my toes. I know he likes to keep himself busy, but this is bordering on ridiculous.

"Let's go." Speaking feels like mouthing cotton, but I know the sensation will pass once I fully wake. "We still have a long road left. I don't want to waste our lead while we're ahead."

If living is winning, then my brother is going to lose at this rate.

I bet he's still forgetting to check his kunai.

Foolish little brother.

I'll see you later, Sasuke. You can ask me these questions then.


End file.
